


Apagón

by Carrogath



Series: Luces [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-04 18:23:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10285787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrogath/pseuds/Carrogath
Summary: A one-night stand turns into two, and Angela has a decision to make.Maybe her mistakes could lead to something better.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Buttons for beta-reading.

On the 19th of March, 2077, Angela takes a flight from Málaga to Mexico City. It’s about twelve hours’ total travel time, including the drive from Gibraltar to the airport and the connecting flight to Madrid. Prior to that, she’d had to make concessions to Winston regarding her second PTO request in two months; cancel all the meetings she’d planned that weekend; scrupulously avoid any questions about what she would be doing in Mexico; and convince herself that Sombra would be there and it wasn’t a trap and the trip would be worth all the trouble. Lena teases her about having a secret Mexican lover. Fareeha seems to know who that actually is.

She tells herself that she’s being paranoid, that no one should know, but by the time she’s in the taxi and on the first plane and then the second plane, first class window seat with a glass of red to soothe her nerves and staring down at the Atlantic, it occurs to her that Fareeha _would_ know. She’d offered her no spite, no pity, no forgiveness, no absolution, only an exhausted sort of disappointment and a lecture about God, which, Angela, being about the least religious person on the planet, had almost taken offense at before realizing that Fareeha had said it all in earnest. The thought curdles the wine in her mouth.

Maybe the diazepam would’ve been better, after all.

The lights in the terminal flicker as she exits the plane at Benito Juárez. Brownouts in the region have been frequent since the First Omnic Crisis, and last year’s ouster of Lumérico president Guillermo Portero couldn’t be helping matters. A television to her right blares news about the outages first and the latest bit of Los Muertos propaganda second, one after the other. She’s dimly aware of the number of people in the airport who might recognize her face for any number of reasons, and of all the things that might go wrong during this trip. She quit smoking a few years ago in the interest of preserving her lungs, but she isn’t drunk enough for who she’s about to see, and not nearly enough for what she’s about to do. It’s embarrassing. Shameful. A disgrace. She might have to turn over all four of her post-graduate degrees in light of what’s about to transpire.

She laments her own good name, drunk from exhaustion after her ten-hour flight—it’s broad daylight in Mexico when it ought to be nighttime in Gibraltar—and after she gets into yet another taxi to reach Sombra’s apartment in Polanco, she calls her from the backseat.

“Angela?”

“Yes,” she says, “it’s me. I made plans. Do you remember?”

“Um…” Sombra pauses. “R-right. Yeah. You did.” She begins to mutter, “Qué carajo es…”

“Sombra?”

“Are you coming over now?”

“In twenty minutes.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Her voice grows quieter. “Puta, no me sor… I’ll be downstairs.”

Once she reaches the building, Sombra is downstairs in the lobby as promised. She’s in a hooded jacket and ripped jeans, all black. As Angela approaches her, she begins to wonder if maybe she made a mistake and she arrived on the wrong day after all. Black isn’t Sombra’s color.

“‘¿No me sorprendas?’” Angela says, raising an eyebrow.

“Come inside.” Sombra beckons her toward the elevators. “The two of us attract enough attention as it is.”

“You weren’t expecting me,” says Angela, as she steps inside the elevator.

Sombra swipes her card and pushes the button to the 33rd floor. “No, I was expecting you, I just… didn’t want to get my hopes up.”

Angela creases her brow. “Why not? I always keep my appointments. I would’ve told you ahead of time if I couldn’t make it.”

“I guess.” She looks nervous. Whatever for?

The elevator dings and the doors slide open, and she follows Sombra to her apartment. “You’ve probably noticed, but the power’s been wonky all day. Been trying to get some work done, but with the lights flickering on and off, I doubt I’ll get that far.”

“That doesn’t bother me.”

“I figured. How’re you and Amari?”

“I broke up with her.”

Sombra stops and turns around. “Excuse me?”

“You didn’t mishear me. I said we broke up.”

“You…” Her eyes go wide. “You’re not joking, are you?”

Angela averts her gaze. “No sense in hurting her any more than was necessary.”

She clucks her tongue and unlocks the door with another swipe of her card. “You move on quick, huh?”

They enter, and as soon as Angela sees that the apartment is empty, she has to resist the temptation to drop her bags and shove Sombra against the wall. “Any quicker and we’d be in bed already.”

“Well.” Sombra blinks. “Make yourself at home, I guess.” She turns toward the kitchen. “I know you like the sweet stuff, so there’s tamarindo in the fridge. No more alcohol unless you’re trying to get kicked out.”

She keeps the warning in mind as she takes off her shoes and makes her way to the guest room. “You don’t have any questions?”

“Oh, I have plenty, mi amor.” Sombra sits down at the kitchen table, where her laptop is. “Though something tells me you didn’t come here to talk.”

She doesn’t unpack—there’s nothing to unpack, really—and her feet lead her to the kitchen behind Sombra before she can think of a response. “Do you remember that I made plans at all?”

“I didn’t think you were serious about it.” There are lines of code running across Sombra’s screen, white text on a black background. She keys in a few commands, then pauses to inspect her work.

“I don’t take these trips on a whim.”

“Did you plan to get drunk and fuck me four weeks ago?”

She folds her arms, her muscles tensing. “Not four weeks ago, no.”

She can hear the smile in Sombra’s voice. “That’s fair.” The lights flicker once. “You OK?”

“Excuse me?”

Sombra continues typing. “It’s only been a couple weeks, right? I remember the call, now. You said something about it being over or…” She mumbles the rest in Spanish.

Angela taps her foot in impatience. “You don’t think I’m over her,” she says.

“You’re not really the type to forget,” she remarks. “Especially not after two weeks.”

She ignores Sombra’s last comment and takes a few steps closer to her chair. “What are you working on?”

“Just cleaning up some files.” The lights flicker again. “Trying to finish a few things before they kill the power again.”

Angela rests her arms against the back of the chair and leans over her, watching her screen. “How do you work under these conditions?”

“If the power’s really fucked, the building runs on portable generators. We pay extra to use the power during outages, though. And since you’re here,” she chuckles, “there’s no reason for me to keep working.”

She dips her head lower, and murmurs in her ear, “Then why are you?”

“’Cause I wanted to make you squirm.” The building makes a strange noise then, a low, electric _voom_. The lights go out for good this time, and a heavy silence fills into the room.

Sombra’s laptop snaps shut. “And that’s my cue.” She turns her chair around to face her, rests an elbow against the table and smiles. “Bienvenido a casa, ángel. ¿Qué te gustaría hacer?”

Angela cracks a grin as she swings a leg over Sombra’s thighs, straddling her. “Oh, you damn well know what.” Angela grips her shirt as she kisses her, resists the urge to grind as Sombra kisses back. Arms wrap around her shoulders, snake around her waist. The contact overwhelms her. She can’t think of anything else.

Sombra pulls away first. “You’re pretty horny, huh?”

Blood pounds in her ears, flushing her skin, and her chest swells with every breath. “Perhaps.”

“Not that I’m complaining.” She runs a hand through Angela’s hair, and she leans into the touch. “Day’s turned out a lot less boring than I thought it was going to be.”

She buries her face into Sombra’s neck. She smells clean, a little like the soap she uses and a little like herself, and Angela feels stupid and emotional and helpless against anything that might happen to her today. Sombra, as she has learned, is beyond hospitable into downright cloying, and right now she’s so affection-starved she’ll take anything, even the watery promises of a criminal. She grips the back of her shirt, breathes into her skin.

Something doesn’t feel right.

She pushes herself up and away from her. “There has to be a catch.”

“Huh?” Sombra blinks at her, confused.

“You’re taking this too well.”

“You ring me up asking for sex and you think I’m gonna refuse you?” She looks incredulous.

“That’s not what I meant,” says Angela. Her brow furrows. “You don’t think this is unusual?”

“There’s a beautiful woman sitting in my lap waiting for me to make sweet love to her.” She tucks her fingers into Angela’s collar, thumbs the button at the top. “And I’m not about to disappoint.” She lets Sombra undo the buttons on her blouse and undress her, watching with obscene pleasure as Sombra admires her body, the gradual exposure of skin. She tugs the blouse off Angela’s shoulders, and then her gaze strays upward and makes eye contact. “This is real, right?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” She looks away. “You’re right. You come running straight into my arms looking for sex, telling me you broke up with your girlfriend and that it’s all over now… It’s at least a ten-hour flight for you, isn’t it?”

“You don’t think I’m real?” says Angela. She laughs at the absurdity of it. “What do you think I am, a hallucination?”

She presses kisses into her neck, then bites down and sucks. Angela arches against her, and Sombra’s hand travels up her spine to her bra strap and undoes the hook. “Drugs are pretty loca nowadays, you know.”

“Ridiculous,” she breathes, and Sombra’s mouth moves down to her clavicle and across her shoulders. “If anyone, it should be me who’s questioning you.” Sombra moves lower, shoves her bra aside and runs her tongue along her breast to her nipple. Her breath hitches.

“You like that?”

She doesn’t manage much more than a groan in response, and doesn’t bother to resist grinding against her. Sombra rubs her thumb in small circles against her other breast, and she cranes her neck and sucks in deep lungfuls of air, straining at the touch.

Something about the situation still bothers her. Had she thought ahead? Of course not. There were no contingency plans. She’d wanted to keep this trip a secret in the first place, so she couldn’t rely on anyone else. She loves the way Sombra tastes—craves it—remembers what happened four weeks ago in February in her bedroom pressed up against her mattress, and the thought’s been drilling into the back of her mind like a goddamned toothache ever since. She _needs_ this.

“I don’t think this is a comfortable position for—”

“Just do it,” Angela hisses.

“Paciencia,” she mutters, and slips a hand into her waistband, past her underwear down to her slit where she bucks at the contact. Sombra’s fingers go in easy, and she gasps and seizes her wrist and pushes them in further. They work her up into a rhythm—urgently, until she’s tugging her pants off her waist and down to her knees—and Sombra makes these hungry little noises against her when she comes, their combined weight sending the chair lurching forward and slamming the kitchen tile underneath. “Fuck,” Sombra swears as she clenches tight around her fingers, and she braces herself, trying to balance them as well as the stupid chair underneath them until she rides out her orgasm and lies against her with a shudder, sweating and panting for breath in the kitchen of all places. “Fuck,” Sombra says again, “fuck,” and Angela grabs the back of her neck and kisses her until she shuts up.

“You,” breathes Sombra, pupils dilated with arousal, “are way too composed right now.”

She looks down at the clothes still hanging around her ankles, and kicks them off with little effort. “Should we take a break?” She presses herself against Sombra, who squirms and flushes bright red in response.

“I…” She looks away. Her self-control is really quite impressive. She shuts her eyes, massaging her temples with her clean hand, and shakes her head. “You’re going to have to explain this to me before we go any further.”

“I’m afraid I don’t I understand what you mean.”

“You broke up with Amari,” says Sombra. “And then you decided to come visit me. To have sex.”

“Right,” says Angela.

“Nine thousand kilometers away. In a foreign country. With a terrorist.”

“You’re more complicated than that.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

She sits upright. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It just doesn’t.”

Angela glowers at her.

“OK,” says Sombra, “look at it from my perspective. This fucking gorgeous blonde doctor, with whom you have had a very rocky relationship from the start, fucks you once during a night of drunken revelry, breaks up with her girlfriend because you asked her not to cheat, and then comes straight back to your place to do it again? I mean, do you love me or what?” She smiles a bit, hard and scared and anxious.

“You’re afraid of me?” she asks.

“You’re not afraid of me?”

“I’m completely nude,” she points out.

“I know.” Sombra sighs. “But I mean—it’s hard to believe.”

“Why else would I be here?”

“I wouldn’t care as much if it weren’t you.”

What was that supposed to mean?

Angela swings her leg back around and stands up off of her, bending over to retrieve her clothes. “Should I put these back on and leave?”

“Are you gonna leave now that we started talking about my feelings?”

She pauses and stares at her. “Sombra?”

“Do you like me, doc?”

She looks down at her clothes. She hadn’t given it much thought, to begin with, and all the responses that come to mind feel inappropriate.

She settles for being honest. “I didn’t think you cared.”

Sombra wets her lips. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

The air isn’t cold, per se, but the sweat is starting to cool on her skin. She pulls on her shirt. “I think it’s a little too early to start talking about feelings.”

“But you did come back.” Sombra stands up. “That has to count for something.”

“You’re reading too much into this.” She walks to the guest room to put her clothes away, and Sombra follows after her like a lost animal.

“You have to admit, that is a long way to go for a lay.”

Angela sits on the bed. She doesn’t mean for it to be inviting, but she doesn’t want to discourage her, either. “I suppose. I was looking to get away from the Watchpoint for a while, and I wanted to get my mind off of Fareeha.”

“You couldn’t find anyone closer?”

“I thought you’d be flattered if I came to you first.”

“I am!” Sombra presses a hand to her chest, leaning over the bed. “But I still want you treat me like more than a piece of raw meat.”

“You’re a good piece of meat.” Angela lets her gaze run over Sombra’s body, along the curves of her breasts and hips. “Tenderloin, at the very least.”

She groans in frustration. “You know what I meant.”

“How so?” She shifts her legs on the bed, opening her thighs, and watches as Sombra’s gaze drops downward.

“Like we do something other than sex,” she murmurs.

“We work together.”

“Other than work.”

“What else is there?” She moves closer to her, thrusting in with her hips. Sombra’s face reddens.

“Not sex.”

“As in?” She leans over, and breathes in her ear.

“Dates. Trips to the beach. Stuff like that.” Sombra turns her head, little by little, until Angela can grab her chin and kiss her and Sombra clutches her shoulders, pinning her down to the bed. Her clothes come off within a matter of seconds, and from looking at her Angela can tell that she’s ready—beyond it, really.

“Get on your back.”

Sombra does as she’s told, and Angela rolls on top of her. She slips two fingers inside of her, and Sombra jerks against them. Then she parts her legs with her other hand, removes her fingers, and dips her head.

“Oh. Oh, f…” Sombra clenches the bedsheets as she works her with her tongue, and she’s amused by how quick she is to unravel at her touch. She licks at her opening until Sombra is grinding helplessly from the friction, and then slides in her tongue as they find a rhythm, and Sombra doubles over and grips her head and rocks until she comes, moaning and swearing in a blend of languages. She’s incomprehensible when Angela raises her head, eyes glazed over with heat.

“Still complaining?”

It takes a minute for her to respond. “You’re… making it really hard.” Her eyes snap back into focus. “Fuck.”

“You should give up.”

“No,” she says, but her tone isn’t very convincing. “I mean—fuck, this is awesome, but…”

“But what?”

“But you’re just going to fuck me and then leave.” Sombra sits up, the juice dripping down her thighs. “Like last time.”

“I thought you wanted it that way,” says Angela, frowning. “You can’t expect me to stay here forever.”

“I don’t.” She rubs the back of her head. “Are you going to keep doing this, though?”

Angela considers it.

“Are we going to be, like… a thing?”

Her brow creases. “A ‘thing’?”

“Lovers,” she says.

“Oh.” She’s not thinking very clearly through her arousal, which was the entire point of taking this trip, and she wants to agree just so Sombra will stop fucking talking and they can get on with it, but she knows that Sombra isn’t the type to forget things either. On top of which, there’s no one better at revenge. “You want to do this again?”

“Yes,” says Sombra, and then, “No. I mean, both.” She blinks. Then she turns away, as if she can’t look at Angela for more than five seconds without getting turned on or embarrassed. “You’re single now, right?”

“You want me to be exclusive?”

“I don’t care if you are or not.” She looks down, and Angela can practically see the gears turning in her head. “But if you want this too—as much as I do, even—then you’ll come back.”

“Regularly,” says Angela.

“More than twice, at least.”

She sits back, propping herself up with her arms. “Is that so important to you?”

She presses her lips together and makes a sort of strangled growling noise in the back of her throat. “Think we’ve already established that you’re a flighty asshole, and I’m not getting played.”

“Oh.” Angela sits up. “Oh?” She smirks a bit. “Is that what you’re worried about?” She leans in, pulling off her shirt again. “You think you have a right to me?”

Sombra moves back, propelling herself with her elbows. “I… No,” she says, without making eye contact. She scowls. “I’m not letting you use me however you damn well please, though.”

“That’s a little hypocritical, coming from you.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not trying to use you, Sombra.” She places her hands on Sombra’s shoulders, and applies the slightest pressure to her scapulae. “But I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength, here. I’m not looking for another relationship.”

She sits up and pulls her hands off her shoulders. “Right. Just another lay.”

“Does that bother you?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Does it matter?” Sombra glares at her. “If you’re not looking for a relationship.”

Perhaps she’d worded it the wrong way, and it occurs to her for the first time in a long time that English isn’t the first language for either of them. “I’m not looking to be in a romantic relationship,” she says, adding on the qualifier.

“Why not?”

“You of all people ought to know already.”

She grins. “Afraid you’re gonna fall so hard for me you’ll never look at anyone the same way again?”

She laughs in surprise. “Speak for yourself.”

“Solo dame un chance,” she says, taking Angela’s hand in both of her own. She looks up into her eyes. “¿Por favorcito?”

Angela looks down. Her hand is pale against Sombra’s skin, and for one surreal moment she sees herself back in Gibraltar and Fareeha is asking her out for the first time and she has all the exact same hesitations about saying yes. (And deeper in the back of her mind, she hears bombs going off and the cries of the wounded, a voice telling her that she doesn’t deserve to be with them, and a promise she made a long time ago to see them as nothing more than flesh and blood and bone and organs. It’s easier that way. Flesh may rend and bones may break, but only people feel pain. Bodies don’t.)

She opens her mouth to say no. Then she closes it, uncertain whether Sombra will accept the rejection with grace. “I can’t,” she says, wriggling her wrist out of Sombra’s grasp. “It’s far too soon. You have to give me more time, I-I…”

“I get it.”

“What?” She looks up, and sees Sombra looking somewhere past her.

“You’re going to keep dragging your ass back here and making all these dumbshit excuses to see me and we’re both gonna fuck ourselves into oblivion.”

“Sombra.”

“I’m done,” she says. Her tone is flat. “Forget about what I said and let’s keep going.”

Angela watches her, and tries to read her mood, her facial expression, her body language, and while Sombra leans over her and kisses her and Angela lets her hands run over her body, she thinks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She dreams about having sex with Fareeha, and when she wakes up to see the mattress empty next to her, she wonders for a moment if the trip to Mexico had been an illusion and she was actually back in Gibraltar in her own bed.

She looks up to see the lights on. There are no windows in the bedrooms of Sombra’s apartment, and the guest room is furnished with nothing more than a nightstand and a dresser. She checks the alarm clock. _18:53_. Then she rests her head back on her pillow and stares up at the ceiling. Beside her, the bedsheets smell like Sombra. There’s no sign of her clothes; Angela can’t tell when she might have left. She can feel herself choke up, absurdly. There’s no reason for her to be upset. She doesn’t have a right to be upset about anything that’s happening to her right now.

She sits up and lets the tears fall from her eyes, and then crumples into the sheets with a sob, burying her face in the comforter. She lets the feeling pass—or tries to—something about the sympathetic nervous system blurs through her head from a college textbook but it doesn’t help. Two decades’ worth of medical knowledge and experience will tell her how sex works, how crying works, how the body processes external stimuli, how people make decisions, how people react to something that hurts them, how people deal with fear and pain and death and trauma, and how they should deal with all those things, but it doesn’t help. Nothing helps. No amount of logic will curb her stupid, senseless behavior.

She knows where Sombra’s liquor cabinet is. It’s glass. She could smash the window and drink herself numb. She could go out into the city and buy her own. She could buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke every single one. There’s diazepam in her luggage. She knows how it interacts with alcohol. Of course she does. She can count maybe thirty, forty, fifty ways to kill a person, including herself. Her hands are shaking, and she’s covered in a film of sweat. She could do it. She could do it. But has she eaten lunch yet? Probably not. What did they serve on the plane? Coffee? No, that was on the flight earlier this morning. It’s evening in Gibraltar. Everyone should be asleep. Where is Sombra?

She sits up and yanks on her clothes, one at a time. She messes up the buttons on her shirt and has to do them again, smoothing out the movements of her trembling fingers until she can will them to go where she wants them. Information hounds her like a swarm of angry insects. She dissects herself from the inside out, starting with the nerves, then the muscles, to the blood pumping in her veins. Then she breathes.

Inhale, then exhale. Breathing techniques. COPD. Stop. Start over. Think again. Her mind buzzes. You would think that there was a solution to everything that a human has ever felt, she thinks to herself, madly, and she makes a conscious effort to stand up and walk into the living room of Sombra’s apartment without trying to diagnose herself with whatever she was feeling.

“Angela?” Sombra stares up at her from the kitchen table. She doesn’t look happy to see her.

_Danke Gott._

English eludes her for a few seconds. “Hallo,” she says.

“Are you all right?”

_Ganz und gar nicht._

“No, not really.”

“What’s wrong?”

_Alles._

“Nothing.”

“Sorry,” says Sombra, now standing upright. “Did you want me to wake you up?”

“Oh, dear God, no.” The question lingers, though, about what Sombra should have done instead. Nothing, probably. She feels weak. “I need to eat something.”

“There’s leftovers in the fridge.”

“Tacos?”

She grins.

“I should’ve guessed.”

She takes out the leftovers and reheats them in the oven, and then sits down across from Sombra as the oven warms up. “I see the power’s back on.”

Sombra closes her laptop again. So polite. “Yeah, supposed to be on for the rest of the day. We’ll see whether that happens.”

It’s quiet. “Did you hear—”

Sombra looks at her attentively, and she can’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“Never mind.” She pours herself a glass of tamarindo for the sugar, but it lacks the burn of alcohol. The craving grinds in the back of her head, and it’s especially bad now for some reason. She feels as bad as she must look. Coffee, maybe? “My head hurts.”

She blinks. “Um…”

“It’ll pass.” She takes another sip of her drink, down the esophagus into the stomach to be ferried away by her cells. She skipped a few steps. That’s not how it works.

Whatever. She takes a bigger gulp, and the sugar latches to the receptors on her tongue. Sweet. She can’t think of what else to say, and she doesn’t want to bore Sombra with the details of her work. She didn’t come here to be a doctor, at any rate. If she did, she could go to the hospital, turn herself into the psych ward, ask to stay a night after claiming a suicide attempt and being diagnosed with major depression. “Sombra.”

“Yeah?”

“I think…” _I think we need to talk._ “I think I miss her.”

She sits back down at that, eyes wide as dinner plates. “Wanna talk about it?”

“No.” She’s telling the truth. “But I do.”

“Um…” Sombra looks uncomfortable. Her spine straightens. What a perfect lumbar curve. “Do you want to… stay a little longer?”

“I have nowhere else to go,” she snaps, and it comes out more forceful than she had meant it. “I’m sorry. It’s been a rough few weeks.”

“What happened?”

_I still love her, probably._

“Yeah,” says Sombra. “Figures.”

“Did I say that aloud?”

She smiles.

Angela doesn’t have the energy to feel guilty or embarrassed about it. She runs her fingers along the side of her glass. “I thought for so long that we could work things out, and we just couldn’t.”

“Well, yeah,” she mumbles. “It happens.”

“It doesn’t just _happen_ ,” Angela hisses, gripping the sides of the table. She begins to rise. “It was me. I’m the one who did it. I was the one who cheated on her.”

“And you owned up to it,” says Sombra. “You told her. You did the right thing.”

“And now we’re done.” She sits back down.

“Yeah.” Sombra doesn’t talk about herself, or make any offers to take Fareeha’s place. It hurts. She smiles and leans over the table. “I don’t mind being your warm body for tonight, but you don’t live in a bubble, eh, doc? You don’t live free from the consequences.”

She has a retort on her tongue, ready and waiting, but it doesn’t feel right to say out loud. “Shit.” She slouches against the back of her chair. “Verdammte Scheisse, ich hab’s satt.” She runs a hand across her face. “I can’t do this anymore, Sombra, I…” She looks at her through her fingers. Then she drops the hand from her face and sighs. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Angela stands, and as she does Sombra mirrors her actions.

“Are you leaving?”

The blood feels like molasses in her veins. Her pulse begins to quicken. “I should… This isn’t going to work out. You know that.”

“Yeah,” says Sombra, “but…”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” She walks out of the kitchen into the living room, and Sombra watches her. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where to go. It’s like I can’t escape it.” She sits on the armrest of the sofa. “It’s as though I have this monster following me around and I can never get away from it.”

“Me too,” says Sombra. She sits on the seat of the sofa next to her. “More than you’d know, actually.”

Sombra is behind her. “Then what do you do? How do you live with it?”

“I’m gonna find it,” she says. “I’m gonna hunt it down and strangle it to death.”

“But what if the monster is you?”

“Never thought about that,” she mumbles. “Maybe. I dunno. Could be.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing, here.”

“So what if it was your fault?” says Sombra. “You apologized. You did your part. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“Except run,” she snaps. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing. You don’t—you don’t deserve this.” She turns around and stares at Sombra. “I’m running. This is stupid, but I’m running from my problems. I broke up with her because I don’t trust myself to be faithful. And I can’t ask the same of you. I cheated on Fareeha,” she smacks the armrest, “and who cheats on Fareeha Amari? She’s blameless! She’s such a good fucking person and I ruined her for myself. I can’t fucking stand it.” Angela buries her face in her hands. “She’s as loyal as a fucking dog and I betrayed her trust.”

“So?”

She glares up at her. “What do you mean, so?”

“Seems pretty selfish to keep beating yourself up, if you ask me.”

Angela bites her lip and looks down. The bitch has a point. “I can’t go back there and look her in the eye again.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Sombra is quiet. It scares her.

“Well, why’d you cheat?”

“I don’t know. I was drunk; I wasn’t thinking.”

“Then maybe you need to think a little harder, mi amor.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious.” Sombra turns so that she’s facing her on the couch. “If you took a minute to think instead of drinking yourself—”

“I know!” She stands up. “I know! I know,” her pulse quickens, “I know I have a problem, mein Gott, do I know. I…” She massages her temples with both hands. “I should resist the cravings, ja klar, ich weiss, bitte erzähl mir mehr.”

“I…” Sombra stands up behind her. “I mean, it was kinda my fault, too. You can’t cheat alone.”

“Don’t even start.”

“Look, I’m sorry I—”

She spins around. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

She clenches her teeth. “Why are you blaming yourself?”

“You’re an alcoholic! I gave you alcohol!”

“You didn’t know.”

“Like hell I didn’t. I…” She looks around nervously. “Fuck, man, ¿qué es eso? I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing.” Angela straightens her spine and glares at her. “It wasn’t you.”

“Excuse me, I was there too! I fucked you!”

“What were you supposed to do, ask for permission?”

“Yes! What?” She shakes her head. “Look, it sure as hell is your fault, but it was my fault, too. Just calm the fuck down.”

“You’re not looking very calm yourself.”

Sombra clenches her teeth. “I want to help you, OK? If you’d stop fighting me then you could go the hell home and fix things with your girlfriend and maybe you wouldn’t be so fucking miserable anymore. Qué mierda, you are a pain in the ass.”

“Then what do you think I should do?” Angela snarls. “If you’re going to be so bold as to give me advice.”

“Talk!”

“What is there to talk about? I cheated!” She presses a hand to her chest. “There is nothing to talk about anymore. We broke up. Why do you think I came here?”

“I don’t know!”

“I came here to be with you!” Angela groans. “I came here to forget about her and be with you.”

“But you don’t want a relationship,” Sombra says. “You just came here to fuck me.”

“And I thought you were OK with that.”

“Well, maybe I’m not!”

Angela’s chest is heaving. They’ve been raising their voices throughout this whole conversation, but it seems to have energized her more than anything else. “I… I can’t do this, Sombra. I can’t do relationships. I cheat. I’m unfaithful. I’m a bad partner. I’m thirty-seven. I should know all of this already.”

“Fine,” she says. “We’ll have an open relationship. Go see whoever the fuck you want.”

“That’s not a relationship.”

“Then it’s not a relationship. ¡Puta, cógeme! Just fuck me! Just get it out of your system. You don’t want a relationship? That’s fine. Cógeme y vete,” she says. _Fuck me and leave._

“No.”

“You gonna fuck someone else, then?” she asks, looking her up and down. “Because you sure look like you need it right now.”

“I’m not…” Angela growls. “I’m not flying all the way to Mexico just to have sex with you.”

“Guess what, bitch?” Sombra snaps, striding up to her. “You just did!” She’s shorter than Angela, so she’s hardly intimidating, but she feels a prickle of annoyance anyway.

“I…” Any reply she has dies on her lips. She presses her mouth shut. Having sex with Sombra isn’t going to help. Leaving isn’t going to help. Talking to Fareeha isn’t going to help; they’re over and Angela isn’t ready to try asking her out again, and she has a feeling Fareeha isn’t interested anyway. Regaining her trust is going to take time. “Why?” she says. “Why are you so interested in me? What do you get out of this? Is it Talon?”

“Does it matter? You don’t trust me anyway.”

“Then why would I bother having sex with you?”

Sombra looks down, uncertain. “Puta, eres tan… Porque…” She grows quiet. “I guess I just thought there was something there for a moment, maybe. Thought maybe you had come to see me because of me. Not because of her.”

She doesn’t know how to respond to that. She wants to go home and be ignored by Fareeha. She wants to forget that all of this happened and go back to work. She’s running away again. _I don’t love you_ , she thinks, and then somewhere, smaller, quieter—once the bombs have gone off and the dust has cleared—and she’s digging through the rubble to find the remains of her parents and she doesn’t realize that they’re dead yet—their faces are ashy. Still. Serene.

And then she realizes that it’s over, and they aren’t waking up anymore, and she doesn’t have anyone left.

She sits down on the sofa. The apartment seems to contract around her, converging on a single point. The lights begin to flicker.

“Carajo, ¿otra vez?” The oven beeps. “Hold on, let me get that. Damn, that took longer than I’d thought…” Then the oven door squeaks open. “You hungry, ángel? ¿Quieres comer?”

Angela rises from the sofa and walks to the kitchen. Sombra is pulling her leftovers out with an oversize, bright pink oven mitt and a frayed, faded potholder that might have been some degree of white in a past life. The scene is so utterly domestic that she bursts into laughter, and Sombra nearly drops the pan in her hands before she sets it on the kitchen counter and stares.

She wraps arms around Sombra’s waist and presses their bodies together against the counter as tight as they’ll go, and kisses her slowly, experimentally, until Sombra relaxes against her and starts to kiss back. Time slows, dilates, then stills. She buries her face in Sombra’s shoulder and breathes in.

“Angela,” she says.

“I know, I know.”

“Are you going to…?”

“I know,” she says, leaning against her. “Just wait.” Her eyes flicker to the oven clock. _19:37_.

“When are you leaving, again?”

“I think it’s…” She doesn’t remember. Sunday? Maybe Sunday. “I think it’s actually…” The lights go out. Then the fan shuts off. The green numbers on the oven clock fade to darkness.

Around them, time stops.


End file.
